The five-minute video was set to be screened at a conference Sunday marking the end of the Six-Day War in 1967 and “50 years of Occupation.”

In opening the video, Sanders, a Jewish Independent who sought the Democratic presidential nomination, called Meretz, which currently has 5 seats in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset, “Israel’s most prominent political organization.” He added that the party stands “for many of the same values that progressives are fighting for here in the United States and throughout the world.”

“We are now in the 50th year of Israel’s occupation, an occupation which denies basic Palestinian rights while failing to deliver Israel real security,” said Sanders.

“I know so many of you agree with me when I say: this occupation must end. Peace, real peace, means security not only for every Israeli, but for every Palestinian. It means supporting self-determination, civil rights and economic well-being for both peoples.”

Sanders called for “a politics of solidarity and a common humanity” and added that “brave people uniting around a common set of values with clear goals, can change a country, they can change the world, they can even change the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Bernie Sanders has used a public appearance in Dublin to lambaste the record of President Donald Trump telling the audience the US president “lies all the time.”

The US senator said Trump’s Budget proposals are “the ugliest and most destructive attack” ever by an American president on the working class, middle class, and poor people of America.

He was loudly applauded during his address to a sold-out event at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre.

His speech and his one-to-one interview on stage by economist David McWilliams was the opening event of the Dalkey Book Festival which begins in earnest on June 15.

Before Sanders was welcomed on stage by McWilliams, the economist said “the magic of Bernie” resulted in tickets selling out in under five minutes, which was quicker than the selling out of the Katie Perry gig at the theatre.

The ‘outreach’ to convince Sanders to appear in Dublin began with a call to his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, host for the evening David McWilliams explained to the crowd, ahead of last night’s much-anticipated Dalkey Book Festival event at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.

O’Meara Sanders has strong Irish roots, McWilliams said – and had managed to convince her husband to add the country to his itinerary.

Taking the stage to a rapturous reception, the Senator told the crowd that Jane had taken a genealogy test that day – and that it had turned out she was 96% Irish. As he put it, “more than the average Irish person in Ireland”.

The couple had paid a visit to the Phoenix Park to visit President Michael D Higgins during the afternoon, we were told. But unfortunately, we never got to hear what was discussed.

Instead, Sanders took the opportunity to unleash a battery of criticism on the Trump administration, in a barnstorming speech.

They point to a slew of down-ballot wins, tallied on the website of Our Revolution, which grew out of Sanders’ presidential campaign, and some higher-profile ones like Rep. Primaya Jayapal’s successful race last year.

And they say party leaders are too quick to pass over races in tough districts, like the one Christine Pellegrino won last month to claim a New York Assembly seat from a part of Long Island Trump carried overwhelmingly.

“The teachers union and the Working Families Party forced the Democratic Party to back a bold progressive in a race that they had written off,” said Dan Lipton, the New York State Director of the liberal Working Families Party.

“It just shows that that message, regardless of the person that it’s attached to, that’s the message that people want to hear,” said Pellegrino, who was a Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

And in almost every race, defenders say, even losing Sanders-wing candidates help shape the eventual winner’s policies.

In a crowd peppered with ‘Feel the Bern’ T-Shirts and Democratic Socialist merchandise, the 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful entered the chamber to rapturous applause. Rapturous is probably an understatement. It bordered on the evangelical. Indeed, for the some in the room, one got the sense that this was quaisi-religious experience.

Sanders was very aware of this audience. “There has never been a generation more open and tolerant,” he told the mainly student filled chamber. Sanders is currently touring cities and universities across the UK, including making a trip to the Other Place, promoting his book Our Revolution. This precipitates some embarrassment:

“My publisher asked me to mention this,” pointing at a copy of the book. It seems the chains of capitalistic venture are hard to break, even for a revolutionary.

Talk quickly turns to the issue of the hour. No, not the UK election (this is evidently a peripheral concern to the Senator), but President Trump’s recent decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Change agreement.

“His decision was stupid… it was dangerous for my own country but also a set back for the entire planet”

June 5, Israel reaches the grim milestone of 50 years of occupation of the West Bank. Many Israelis have become complacent and succumbed to the government’s argument that the continuing occupation is necessary to safeguard Israel’s national security.

Sounds like what most people here in the US feel about the middle east.

ExxonMobil is being accused of using “sham” accounting to “mislead” investors about the likely financial risks posed by climate change, which New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said was evidence of potentially “wide-ranging fraud” executed under the direction of former CEO and current U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

In a court filing with the New York state Supreme Court on Friday, Schneiderman’s office said that the oil giant had used “secret, internal figures [that] understated the degree to which Exxon was taking into account the risks of climate change regulations.” These figures “were not as conservative” as the so-called “proxy costs” that the company provided to investors.

A coalition of influential officials in Arizona and Utah is urging the Trump administration to consider rolling back Obama-era environmental protections that ban new uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.

They argue that the 20-year ban that came into effect in 2012 is unlawful and stifles economic opportunity in the mining industry. But supporters of the ban say new mining activity could increase the risk of uranium-contaminated water flowing into the canyon. Past mining in the region has left hundreds of polluted sites among Arizona’s Navajo population, leading to serious health consequences, including cancer and kidney failure.

The new appeal to the Trump administration appears in the draft of a letter expected to be sent on Monday to the US interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, by the Mohave county board of supervisors, whose region borders the north side of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. Similar letters are being drawn up by other regional leaders in neighboring county governments in southern Utah, to be sent to Washington by the end of the week, according to officials.

The Mohave leaders also plan to dispatch a second letter on Monday asking the federal government to scrap national monument protections for lands of natural wonder “throughout Arizona”, claiming their designation is unconstitutional and prevents economic development of coal, oil and gas deposits. Utah leaders will follow with letters requesting the government shrink national monuments in southern Utah, such as Bears Ears and Grand Escalante, in order to open up a greater area for mineral exploitation, the Guardian has learned.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain have cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing it of supporting terror, in the Gulf Arab region’s most serious diplomatic crisis in years.

The countries said they planned to break off all land, air and sea traffic with Qatar, and eject its diplomats from their territories. Qatar was also expelled from a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.

Yemen’s internationally backed government, which no longer holds its capital and large portions of the country, also cut relations with Qatar, as did the government based in eastern Libya.

The coordinated move dramatically escalates a dispute over Qatar’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest Islamist movement, and adds accusations that Doha even backs the agenda of regional arch-rival Iran.

Saudi Arabia said it took the decision to cut diplomatic ties due to Qatar’s “embrace of various terrorist and sectarian groups aimed at destabilising the region”, including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, Islamic State and groups supported by Iran in the kingdom’s restive eastern province of Qatif. Egypt’s foreign ministry accused Qatar of taking an “antagonist approach” toward Egypt and said “all attempts to stop it from supporting terrorist groups failed”.

Qatar is the most politically liberal of the Gulf states (admittedly a low bar). It hosts Al Jazeera TV and the Doha Debates. You can drink in its hotels and women can walk around uncovered, drive cars, and associate comparatively freely. Its universities are western in feel and appearance. There are of course many things to criticise, above all the treatment, conditions and lack of rights of migrant workers, lack of women’s and LGBT rights and freedom of speech, and the absence of meaningful democracy. But Saudi Arabia it isn’t.

For Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Co-operation Council states to claim Qatar is the main sponsor of state terrorism, and put it under potentially crippling blockade, is the most monstrous example of the pot calling the kettle black. Qatar has indeed financed violent groups in the Middle East and participated in the war in Yemen, but in both cases on a far less grand scale than Saudi Arabia.

What is really behind this blockade against Qatar is an attack on another aspect of its liberalism. Qatar is unenthusiastic about the USA/Israel/Saudi de facto alliance, which has already been in evidence for a couple of years, and which the Trump mission to the Middle East looked to turbocharge. Qatar refused to endorse the overthrow of Egypt’s democratically elected President by the CIA-backed military coup of General Sisi. Qatar also has deep reservations about the Saudi Wahhabist mission to spread sectarian war against the Shia across the Middle East. Qatar further deserves praise because the plight of the Palestinians is a far higher priority for Doha than it is for Riyadh. The Saudis have no problem with selling out the Palestinians completely to secure their own standing with the Western elites and further their rivalry with Iran.

The extent to which Qatar has been able to act upon its different instincts to its much larger and more powerful neighbour has been limited, and by and large it has been obliged to go along with the Saudis in the Gulf Cooperation Council without expressing too much dissent. It is Trump’s visit and the desire of the Saudis to increase the security coordination with the USA and Israel which has forced the Qatari Royal Family to take a stand of principle, which sadly they are unlikely to be unable to maintain in the face of the blockade.

Journalists in the US face a crisis of legitimacy as constant abuse by Donald Trump undermines the public’s trust in an agreed set of facts, the head of a leading media museum has warned.

Jeffrey Herbst, chief executive of the Newseum in Washington, predicted that the president’s denigration of the media would encourage authoritarian regimes to target reporters, newspapers and broadcasters around the world.

On Monday, the Newseum will rededicate its Journalists Memorial, adding the names of 14 journalists who died in Afghanistan, Brazil, India, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Somalia, Syria and Ukraine to represent all those killed in pursuit of the news in 2016. Now, however, concerns over hostility to the press are lapping at America’s shores.

“My biggest fear in the United States is delegitimisation of journalists,” Herbst said. “This has been occurring over a long period of time: trust in the media has eroded in the United States for 20 years, partially because of complaints about the media, but frankly, trust in every institution in the United States has eroded over the last 20 years except for the military.

“But obviously in the [2016] campaign and since then, due to the attacks by the president, while some people have rallied around journalists, I think it’s also caused this crisis of legitimisation to increase.

Does the American dream exist? Or has the middle class ruined it by hoarding opportunity on a scale that makes even the infamous one-percenters appear harmless and ineffectual?

That’s the question economics professor and Brookings Institution fellow Richard Reeves has set out to answer, and his findings are worrying: the top echelons of the US middle class – those earning over $120,000 – are separating from the rest of the US, and pulling up the drawbridge behind them.

The result, Reeves writes in a new book Dream Hoarders, out this week, “is a less competitive economy, as well as a less open society”.

“The upper middle class families have become greenhouses for the cultivation of human capital. Children raised in them are on a different track to ordinary Americans, right from the very beginning,” he writes.

The upper middle class are “opportunity hoarding” – making it harder for others less economically privileged to rise to the top; a situation that Reeves says places stress on the efficiency of the US economic system and creates dynastic wealth and privilege of the kind the nation’s fathers sought to avoid.

The international funders behind the hydroelectric dam opposed by murdered Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres are withdrawing from the project, the Guardian can reveal.

Three financial institutions had pledged loans worth $44m for the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque river, which is considered sacred by the Lenca people and which Caceres campaigned against before her death.

Her murder last year triggered international outrage and piled pressure on the international backers to pull out of the project amid a campaign of intimidation against communities opposed to the dam.

The Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Copinh) – the campaign group Caceres co-founded – has long demanded that investors withdraw and make reparations for the human rights violations linked to the project.

At a time when storms are getting more destructive, floods more devastating and people and property more vulnerable, accurate weather forecasting is more critical than ever.

Which is why the Trump administration’s brazen proposal to slash funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) most important forecasting and storm prediction programs has set off alarms in recent days. In all, the president wants to slash the agency’s budget by 16 percent.

Having spent more than six years as a NOAA scientist, I know there are ways to become more efficient and make government work better. Many dedicated professionals within the agency would be eager to partner with the administration to develop that kind of action plan.

Except, efficiency is not what this proposal is about. Rather, it blatantly disregards science and how it protects lives and property.

Here are a few of the NOAA budget lowlights, and why they could matter to you:

Accusing the state school of violating public records law, a group of George Mason University students and alumni brought a lawsuit to shed light on the support it gets from billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch.

Augustus Thomson, a current undergraduate, filed the complaint on May 26 with the student-led group Transparent GMU, saying they have been waiting nearly two months for a response to their request for records on the school’s contribution and gift records from 2008 to 2012.

Specifically, the students seek documentation on whether the Kochs or their many charitable organizations, including the now-defunct Claude R. Lambe Foundation, communicated with the university about any fundraising activity, grants, contracts or gift agreements.

Transparent GMU has been around for only a year, but the group says its members have been advocating for greater transparency since 2014 “when they learned that public universities in other states had agreed to give private donors influence over curriculum development and faculty hiring decisions.”

“Trump administration approves Keystone XL pipeline,” the headlines blared. It was March 24, only two months after he’d taken office, when it appeared that President Trump had cleared the way for the long-contested tar sands conduit with a stroke of his pen.

In reality, summarily declaring that the pipeline is in the national interest—despite a seven-year U.S. State Department review process that had concluded the opposite—won’t magically bring it to life. The president, together with TransCanada, the energy company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, still have many obstacles to overcome before Canadian tar sands crude can flow through KXL and into the United States.

The first formidable hurdle they face is the state of Nebraska, which TransCanada has treated with contempt in recent years. First, the company drew the pipeline’s route through the heart of the state’s fragile Sand Hills ecosystem. Confronted by environmental concerns, TransCanada said that rerouting the pipeline would be “impossible.”

Mounting resistance, however, forced the oil giant to relent and nudge the proposed route around some of the most sensitive parts of the Sand Hills. The pipeline would still, however, run through the important Ogallala aquifer—one of our largest underground stores of freshwater, which would be at significant risk in the event of a leak.

Now that the controversial tar sands pipeline has been reactivated by President Trump’s decision, TransCanada must obtain the consent of the Nebraska Public Service Commission and secure easements from the landowners along the proposed route through the Cornhusker State. It will not be smooth sailing.

Minnesota regulators are getting ready to open a series of 22 public meetings on an oil pipeline project that opponents have dubbed the next Dakota Access pipeline struggle.

Enbridge Energy is seeking approval to replace its aging Line 3 pipeline across northern Minnesota. The meetings along the proposed route are meant to give the public a chance to comment on the draft environmental review for the project, which was released last month. The first two meetings are scheduled for Tuesday, and a final decision from Minnesota isn’t expected until next year.

The Democrats’ strategy could be summed up in two words: Donald Trump.

He was, they asserted again and again, unacceptable, immoral and corrupt. Every focus group they assembled raised serious questions about his disparagement of various ethic groups, his brutish mannerisms, his business ties to foreign governments, his lack of qualifications. Almost every professional polling firm showed deep and mounting disapproval of his behavior—he was, they calculated, the most unpopular candidate in American history. Many in the Republican establishment criticized or outright denounced him. And yet, defying all the confident predictions right up until election night, Trump managed to eke out a shocking victory, relying particularly on a surge of “forgotten voters” in the Midwest.

You’d be forgiven, of course, if you thought this was a recap of the 2016 election. Actually, it’s what the same pundits who got 2016 so wrong very well might be saying again four years from now. Such a mind-blowing, spirit-crushing, defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory redo of the last election should keep smart Democratic operatives up at night. Yet it doesn’t.

Like Inspector Javert or, perhaps more appropriately, Wile E. Coyote, the Democrats remain fixated on getting their man, Trump, and proving wrong the voters who elected him. At first glance, the daily drip of new and shocking revelations over Russia looks like a mounting shadow over the White House, and it very well may prove to be its undoing. But the instant scandal—it seemed to start the minute Trump was declared president-elect—also threatens to further decimate the Democratic Party. And Democrats don’t seem to know it.

President Donald Trump complained Monday morning that his travel ban executive order, one that the White House on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to reinstate, had been “watered down” by the Justice Department in order to pass legal muster.

Still, he wrote on Twitter, the controversial measure is necessary despite the legal hurdles it has faced thus far.

“People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Trump wrote early Monday morning in a multi-post flurry. “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.”

﻿ This may be the strangest election of my lifetime. Called by Prime Minister Theresa May after she vowed repeatedly that she’d do no such thing, it seemed at first like an assured triumph for the Tories—and possibly the coup de grâce for Jeremy Corbyn’s divided and floundering Labour Party. But six days before the vote, the poll gap has shrunk from 22 points to an astonishing four, with some projections even predicting a hung Parliament.

﻿ May, too, seems to shrink by the day, hiding behind her “strong and stable” mantra, too scared to take part in the BBC’s televised leaders’ debate (she sent Home Secretary Amber Rudd instead, two days after Rudd’s father’s death), speaking to carefully managed crowds but saying almost nothing. Like David Cameron after the EU referendum, she’s beginning to look like someone who knows she miscalculated, led astray by complacency and a blind sense of entitlement.

Corbyn, on the other hand, seems to have found his voice. Always happier on the campaign trail than in Parliament, he comes across as direct, relaxed, and confident.

Colombia’s Atrato River is one of the most polluted waterways in the in the country. Now, thanks to a decision by Colombia’s Constitutional Court, the Atrato has its own legally recognized right to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration.”

Yes, it’s a river, and it has rights.

This remarkable development happened because caring, concerned people banded together. Representatives of affected indigenous groups, Afro-Colombian organizations and the NGO Tierra Digna brought the case in 2015. Their aim was to require better protection for the Atrato River and the people who live within its basin and along its shores.

The court ruling stated, in part:

According to this interpretation, the human species is only one more event within a long evolutionary chain that has lasted for billions of years and we [humans] therefore, in no way, are the owner of other species, biodiversity or natural resources, or the fate of the planet. Consequently, this theory conceives nature as a true subject of rights that must be recognized by states and exercised under the tutelage of their legal representatives, for example, by the communities that inhabit it or have a special relationship with it.
Imagine that — a court recognizing that nature ought to have legal rights and that humans don’t automatically have dominion over the earth and its resources.

“Today, 15 years after George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” oratory set the stage for ongoing military carnage, politicians who traffic in unhinged rhetoric like “Putin is the ringleader of the unfree world” are helping to fuel the warfare state—and, in the process, increasing the chances of direct military conflict between the United States and Russia that could go nuclear and destroy us all. But such concerns can seem like abstractions compared to possibly winning some short-term political gains. That’s the difference between leadership and demagoguery.”